Evening Star Newspaper, April 27, 1930, Page 98

ALEXANDER POPE. By Edith Sitwell. New York: Cosmopolitan Book Corporation. HY the study of a man, a poet at that, now dead and gone almost 200 years? Life today is com- pact of current stuff, of rushing events in a tremendous hurry toward the future. Besides, poetry is not of much account today. Almost nobody reads Hardly any of this summary is true, though in careless accounting it may seem to be an exact statement of the fact. Men of the past, of any past, are of deep concern to the present, provided only that they have had the capacity to keep alive through the intervening years. They are history. Granted. But they are also liging partakers of our own present. It is a mistake to declare that poetry is, nowadays, neither written nor read. 1 doubt if, in any period, more general interest in poetry has been manifest than is shown today, or if more poets were ever trying themselves out in poetic composition than at the present time. How- ever, all this has nothing to do with Miss Sit- well’'s study of Alexander Pope, save to forecast for the boock a much wider and warmer resep- tion than these casual surveys would indicate. Here is one poet going back into history for an accounting of a truly great genius in poetic . ereation. It is partly by such affinity of mind " that the story of Pope comes out anew here. It is more, however, in the spirit of the cham- pion that Miss Sitwell takes up arms in sup- port of the greatness of Pope. There is some- thing clearly defensive in this writer's attitude throughout, yet not once does it decline to mere defense. Frank recognition of the per- sonal frailty of Pope—of his bodily and moral frailty—gives all the more strength to the author’s claim of genius for the poet himself. A study of this poetry, a waywise and sym- pathetic study, stands in reminder of the tech- nical perfection of Pope’s work, of ils superb finish at a period when such technical per- fection of sequence and sound was the stamp . of high poetry. It will not be easy to find a more communicable study of eighteenth century poetry, one freer from stilted schoolcraft as such than the one given here. More than this, there is here an intimate setting of the greatest of Pope’s work within the fabric of surrounding English life that will be a satisfying joy to students who look upon all art as an inherent - part, an emanation of its surroundings in the life of its period. Innumerable incidents, anecdotes, passing pictures, amplify and illuminate not only the . life of Pope, but the life of England as well. Pashions have changed in the ways of art no less than in the fashions of daily life and com- mon speech and general outlook, so that the English eighteenth century seems far away and " strange. In this study of one of the poets of that period the whole is re-created, giving a sympathetic and intelligible projection not only of the poet himself, but of all that which made both him and the England of that day. A ~ chapter of substantial history, a study of in- dividual man, an appreciation of genius, a - study of poetry itself—these accrue from Miss - Sitwell’s competent and truly inspired study of the life and work of Alexander Pope, English genius of two centuries ago, living poet of this century and many to come—no one doubts. SHOW ME DEATH. By W. Redvers Dent. New York: Harper & Brothers. “WHAT’S living, Slim, what's living? We paddle around in the mud awhile, and even these marks are washed away in the next day’s rain. As for me, show me death, for at least it is something that gives us a new ad- venture. Will it be oblivion, or will I wake up in*“the lap of God?” Neither skeptic nor blasphemous—just a war- "~ soaked soldier instead. And here is the story of a Canadian war-man, a record, I think, that stands for the courage and gallantry and en- durance of the famous army of Canadian fighters in the big war. Another of those “plain tales” of hard-boiled Kiplingesque flavor which, just now, are coming out to picture the war as it was, as all war is. The parade is over. The glitter of trappings, the prancing of war horses, the sculpturesque absurdity of the man-on- horseback, the booming and the bugling, the shouting and the tumult—these are gone into the limbo of buried barbarities, where they belong. Instead, we are getting from gifted young writers who were there, who did the work, just what the thing was, what the mon- strous thing ever is. Hosts of men, heavy with war tools, slog-slog-slogging through miles of rain and cold, slipping through the trenches’ + already a-wash with rain, slimy with rotting men, stinking with corrupt man-stuff, skitter- ing with hungry rats, or, now and then, camp- ing for the minute in shell holes along with the rank obscenity of men over-long dead. Something like this is the gathering out of this Canadian soldier’s story. Yet it is in no sense a sensational recording. That is, it is not such " by intent. Instead, it is a story of the day’s work in active war time. Some easements © ecome, pitiful easements they seem to the reader —an added bite of horse meat, a corner of the buddy’s blanket, a little closer snuggling in out of the rain or snow. Maybe a game of cards in moments of extra gayety, possibly a long hot drink of—I don't know what. I've forgotten— " but ‘t was warming and heartening and savage, as it should have been in that clearly savage und:rtaking. A hopelessly sketchy touch, this, _ for a book that is so in-reaching, so up-rooting, 80 undesignedly pitiful that it is not to be gotten over, not to be set aside, not to be run away from. Stark naked in the brutalities of war, it slogs along beside the reader, seeing to it that the realities of this ancient and honorable business of killing one another lose none of their savors, as these came into the open under the inspiration of moderm ingenuity bent to the ardors of batile. A great story, with prob- THE SUNDAY STAR, WASHINGION, D. C, APRIL 27, 1930 The Study of a Man and a Poet—Wide Variety of New Novels From Publishers. Several War Stories. Alexander Pope, the Eighteenth Century Poet. ably not a sentence of untruth about it and yet not a thousandth part of the truth of war able to creep into it. For this is an eye-witness matter, a partaking matter, a dying matter for many comrades and with death snatching at the writer himself many a time. Indeed, no more than a job-lot of man, wreckage just shy of being total, came home to write this story of the real soldier in a lamentably real war. Great stuff! We need more of the same sub- stance. A PAREWELL TO ARMS. By Ernest Heming- way, author of “Men Without Women,” etc, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. NO’I‘ strictly speaking a new book. Certainly not brand new. Nowadays a story falls into old age inside its first year. That is, most books do. This one, however, is going to live longer than that, for good and substantial reasons. My belated reading of it comes as a bit of good fortune since it places it beside Redvers Dent’s “Show Me Death.” The two belong together. They are, in effect, one. They sub- stantiate each other in detail. They corrobo- rate, together, the ghastly totality of nations, flamboyantly “civilized,” fighting one another in surpassing ingenuities of modern war theories and war practices. The difference between these two novels is that of temperament, two sorts of men working in the same field. Both bent upon the truth. Both possessed of the gift of dramatic imagination—artists in their work. In texture the two stories separate. Naturally they do this. Ernest Hemingway knows, professionally, the value of the woman element in dramatic inventions. He skimps it as much as it is possible to do this. One gets en inkling that he hates it. But, the world to be entertained is bigger than he is, so he slings in a woman now and then, sort of by the heels, as it were. A robust fellow with his words, a hard-hearted lad with the tender passion—but & beautiful man with his sentences, neverthe- less. Not an artist any more secure in “in- sight” than he is in “through-sight.” He sees through us, all of us, and this gives him a touch of satire, an ironic slant which lies quite this side of bitterness and gall. Rather does this quality take effect in robust laughter, in a chastened Rabelaisian humor drawn off from the free-speaking of an older day and softened by the near-amenities of modern life. I heard & man say that Hemingway was “vulgar”—and 80 I read the book, without finding it that way at all. A commandingly fine story on the frail and delicate subject of human nature, human nature in war time. CHRISTINE: And Other Stories. By Julian Green, author of “The Dark Journey,” etc. Translated from the Prench by Courtney Bruerton. New York: Harper & Brothers. FOUR of the Julian Green short stories come into this volume. All were written, as I recall, before the publication of ‘his novels. All are of the Julian Green order of invention. The literary distinction of Julian Green—born American, bred French and composing in his adopted tongue—is not so positively in the structure of his work as it is in his chosen field of invention. Not so clearly does his work stand out from that of many another writer in its excellence of structure nor in the charm of its personality. The technic is submerged, so to speak, in the reach for positive re-creation, for an embodied realization of the matter in hand. And that, I take it, is what literary com- petency means. Julian Green’s prime pre- occupation is with the mind in those curious and inscrutable divergencies from the-accepted form of mental procedure. For instance, in one of these short stories, .O’Donovan, Dan O’Donovan, is driven all his life by a defeating strain of his own blood, of which naturally he knows nothing, and against which he can, therefore, set up no defense. Frustration is the lot of Dan O'Donovan, a completely thwarted life. Lots of O'Donovans in the world. In a sense, most of us are that very man himself. To him Julian Green devotes an ardor of search and intultion and knowledge and ex- pert workmanship whose effect upon the reader is that of actual personal terror. Again, here is the story of a little boy in some deep secret corner of whom lurk impulses which later will come into the open in a lust of killing—the homicidal mania traced to its secret place within the unfortunate and unconscious human. Here, too, is the little girl whose blood is growing occult drifts, mysterious powers on their way to fruition as an active force in the outer world. Loneliness, terrible and self-consuming, is another theme for Julian Green. Such as these he probes and tosses and worries and flays till they lie stripped before him in their in- dividual behaviors. He lifts them then, one by one, bodily over into the pages of a story— and there you are, reading a Julian Green bit of wizardry in the line of psychologic errancy and abrormality. Or is it “abnormal” after all? SHARD. By Daphne Lambart. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Pmrvuum. The story, in essence, goes back to times when the novel, as such, had not yet arrived. Back to when it was feel- ing its way through pagan fable and human attribute personified to the present, full growth of the modern novel. The old writers at a certain stage of this development used, you remember, to dress up single human traits— hate or love, greed, jealousy, generosity, kind- ness, whatnot, calling each of these the whole man, which no doubt it was, and is. Around the chosen virtue or vice they built the outer personality in its likeness. This is exactly what Daphne Lambart has done, all in the current mood of this morning or last night. A family, the Shards, rather a tribe of three grown and charming children, a brother and two sisters, are here evaporated and condensed to their basic substance of self-sufficiency, both the family sort and the individual brand. Rich and handsome and well grounded in English com- petency these, you see, are able to have things pretty much their own way. They do. That is what the story is about. The oldest girl develops a passion for her woman friend, an artist. They set out to live together—a familiar situation nowadays. In the course of no long time the woman is drowned at the sea coast, where the two chance to be. Deep down in Friends are truly boring in the long run. The other girl loves a man—or thinks she does. At any rate, she loves him to the point of immediate marriage. A mistake. The fervors have cooled. Long tedium, instead, un- folds to the imagination of the girl. Easy to avert such personal disaster. Send him adrift. Never mind the man. He'll get over it. . Men always do. Let’s hurry home and play some more together—we three Shards. That is ale ways best. And the brother, Vivian, in a way wholly unpremeditated finds himself with a wife. One need be no more than half-wit to realize the kind of life for her there in the grand old Shard home. With the single spark “To be sure, old Swallow set! thing so neatly—for us.” Waywise and restrained, cool, collected and form, light, sketchy and vividly effective. THE NEGRO IN WASHINGTON: A study in Race Amalgamation. By A. H. Shannon, B. D, M. A. New York: Walter Neale, publisher, Tmsmumcmflmmwmmgwn. Rather by virtue of the compact character of that area, the proportion of its Negro popu- lation, the accessibility of facts bearing upon the subject, the Capital is made use of as a standard of comparison and measurement. The work itself covers, in effect, the whole western continent. The purpose of the study is that of gospel, the gospel of race purity. The angie of approach is the Negro himself, his advance, his destiny—not, vehemently not, to be aie tained—through a blend of Negro and Caue= casian blood. Rather is it to be secured througin an intensive cultivation of his exclusive racial traits. In the distance, somewhat faintly oui- lined is a future for the American Negro 1n Africa, creating another great civilization from this schooling among the white contacts of the present in America. However, the substance of the study is given over to statistieal reports of comparative population-—full-blood Negro, mulatto, ‘“near-white.” The distribution ->f these is defined and the status of each in its particular locale is made the subject of peinted disclosure. A prime argument in the discuse sion is that the pure-blood Negro should be held to that particular purity of strain, but that, in addition, he should be accorded full oppor- tunity for growth within this speecific racial limit. A full account of failure in this direction is made here. The mulatto and the “near= white” are accorded opportunity—the black man none at all in comparison. The book is packed with carefully collected facts upon the subject. It has distinct value to the student in this respect. An interesting topic is that which assumes to lay the causes of divergence between Latin America and the north country above it, in respect to growth in modern civilization. When the Spaniards and Portuguese came this way— adventurers, explorers, conquerors—they left their women at home. When the Nordic people Continued on Twenty-first Page